Cursing the Biographer

Reading more on Lax.  If only McGregor had had someone make him take out the two first paragraphs about the painter Ad Reinhardt on page 219.  They sound like potted opinions couched to apologize to the reader for talking so much about this old-fogey painter friend of Lax’s, now forgotten, unlike our dear hero, Lax himself, a painter of quaint abstract works “emblematic of a bygone era.”  He cites Barbara Rose.  Can you imagine?  Oh the damnation that phrase places anyone under, the lowest depths of the inferno.  “McGregor, by all that is plaid and shamrocky, I hereby curse thee thyself as a biographer, writer, and friend of culture, to become yourself, the sooner and the better, “emblematic of a bygone era.”